Brand orientation
How does an organization’s approach to branding affect its ability to build and protect brand value, or risk trademark degeneration? This question underpins the concept of brand orientation, examining how brands gain or lose distinctiveness and the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to brand management.
In my doctoral thesis (1997) I argued for a new corporate approach (mindset) towards brands: brand orientation. The aim was to examine how an organization’s approach to brands can (1) ideally, help to build and protect brands as strategic resources or (2) in the worst case, result in loss of distinctiveness and trademark degeneration (a brand that has lost its distinctiveness may become a common word forming part of the language). In the worst-case scenario, the corporation loses its exclusive right (ownership) to the trademark, which thereafter is free for all to use. What happens in the process where values and meaning are created was one of the intriguing questions of my thesis. Words such as dynamite, windsurfer, vespa, insulin, and gramophone are examples of successful brands which have eventually degenerated. Today, leading brands such as Google, iPod, and Rollerblade are sometimes used to describe a type of products or services, which can be a sign of loss of distinctiveness.
Words such as dynamite, windsurfer, vespa, insulin, and gramophone are examples of successful brands which have eventually degenerated.
The concept of trademark degeneration is both a key and a gate to a range of fundamental questions related to brands and the management of brands. In the case studies Nestlé (Nescafé), Tetra Pak (Tetra Brik), DuPont (Teflon), and Pharmacia (Nicorette) I examined how brands are built and how they may be lost. My research called for the integration of legal, semantic, semiotic, marketing, communication, and strategic theory.
In retrospect, I view the main contributions of my thesis as the brand orientation approach and its conceptual framework, the process of the creation of meaning and value (and loss of the same), and the corporation’s value foundation. For me, as a researcher, finding a methodological approach was and still is of value and importance.
Primus or Thermos?
Photo: benjamin Kaufman © Unsplash